Crosby Kemper III and Star columnist Steve Rose duel over a KC Library event

Credit goes to whichever editor at The Kansas City Star penned the headline of Steve Rose’s most recent column. Headlines are meant to grab attention, and the one above Rose’s piece does the job.

R. Crosby Kemper is blinded by rage over Kansas City hotel deal, the headline reads online.

Rose’s column takes Kemper, CEO of the Kansas City Public Library, to task for inviting a University of Texas-San Antonio researcher to speak to an audience at the downtown library on Wednesday about Kansas City’s plan to forge ahead on an 800-room, $311 million hotel project.

Heywood Sanders, a Harvard-educated professor at UTSA, is a researcher who concentrates his work on the economic effects of cities pursuing convention business — specifically, cities that chase this business by encouraging the development of hotel and meeting facilities, often with a sizable public price tag. Sanders generally finds that projections of economic prosperity put forth by cities and convention-facility developers are overblown. Sanders has published a book called Convention Center Follies: Politics, Power and Public Investment in American Cities.

I spoke to Sanders in May when preparing this story about the proposed convention hotel in the Crossroads Arts District, about half of which will be funded by public tax sources. Most news stories up to that point had reported on the convention hotel without any critical voices. I found him to be thoughtful, well-versed on the subject, and reasonably skeptical about the promises of economic windfall that usually accompany these proposals.

Rose takes issue with the library’s promotion of Sanders’ appearance, which asks the question of whether a forthcoming hotel can boost the city’s prospects, given that earlier public investments in Bartle Hall haven’t spurred convention business as promised. His piece ran on Saturday, the same weekend that the Star’s editorial board endorsed the hotel project.

More to the point: Rose feels that it’s inappropriate for the leader of the library, which is funded largely by property taxes, to set the stage for what the columnist feels will be a one-sided lecture against Kansas City’s convention-hotel deal. He also criticizes Kemper for using the library as a platform to espouse his personal views, which are generally libertarian. (Kemper is the chairman of libertarian think tank Show-Me Institute.)

“I asked him [Kemper] repeatedly if he would consider presenting the other view,” Rose writes.

What Rose doesn’t know is that hotel proponents have ducked debating Sanders in the recent past.

E-mails obtained by The Pitch show that Mike Burke, a central member of Kansas City’s convention-hotel development team, sought advice from VisitKC CEO Ronnie Burt and other public relations professionals when KCUR 89.3 asked Burke to appear alongside Sanders on its weekday show Up to Date, hosted by Steve Kraske.

The response to Burke was advice to avoid Sanders.

“There is no value for us to debate someone from Texas who is not in this market, who would likely have no valuable KC data to form an opinion from,” wrote Burt, the leader of Kansas City’s tourism and convention bureau, on May 15. “Besides the fact that Denver, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Austin and Nashville have all seen growth. LA is adding another hotel next to LA Live etc…The KC community has all been supportive, knows the impact it has had on us without one and are eager to move forward. No need for us to get circular on this.”

Burke didn’t appear on Up to Date the following week, although he did call into a later episode when the Show-Me Institute’s Patrick Tuohey was a guest appearing on the show to discuss the hotel. (Up to Date had Sanders on the show today, along with Burt’s predecessor, Rick Hughes.)

When the city announced plans for the convention hotel in May, no one with a counterpoint was invited to speak.

“I think it was a cheerleading event,” Rose tells The Pitch. “That’s how I would do it. It wasn’t part of a lecture series. I think there’s a really major distinction.”

Rose adds that he thinks the library should at least have someone speak in favor of the convention hotel, even if it’s not the same day as a critic’s appearance. He doesn’t think that Thursday morning’s open forum with Sanders quite cuts it in that regard.

“Two hundred fifty people aren’t going to be there to hear what’s going on at the breakfast,” Rose says.

The library isn’t a disinterested observer in the convention-hotel discussion. The hotel’s financing package involves a sale-leaseback of the hotel property to a public development agency, which effectively nullifies property taxes that would otherwise be generated by private development and provide funding to Kansas City Public Schools and the library. In the library’s case, it means $779,095 uncollected over 30 years.

When I called Kemper on Monday, I didn’t sense rage coming from the library director. But he wasn’t thrilled with Rose’s piece. He says he plans to write a response to the Star’s publisher and top editors. He has also invited current and future Kansas City councilmembers to attend a breakfast meeting at the library on Thursday.

Kemper tells The Pitch that he wanted to bring Sanders because he feels that the city itself is giving a one-sided view of how well it thinks the convention hotel will perform, based largely on projections put forth by consultants. (The consultant working with the city and the hotel-development team, HVS, published criticisms of Sanders’ research last year.)

“There’s a phony aspect to this,” Kemper says. “There’s no independent, objective evidence or presentation on the other side.”